


The Only Love I've Known

by daftalchemist



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Angst, Darkfic, Eldritch Abomination Cecil, M/M, Mind Control, Non-Consensual, Rape, Tentacle Rape, implied past Kevin/Cecil
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-28
Updated: 2013-08-28
Packaged: 2017-12-24 22:47:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/945576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daftalchemist/pseuds/daftalchemist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cecil loves Carlos, but Carlos doesn't love Cecil. Fortunately, Cecil was taught long ago the way to make someone love you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Only Love I've Known

**Author's Note:**

> Beta thanks to sub3rduck. Also thanks to f1rstperson because I kept sending her snippets of this thing and she kept flipping her shit over how much she loved it and that really helped me keep writing.
> 
> This fic is more grimdark than dark so fair warning to anyone who's not into that sort of thing. This will fuck with your emotions hard.

The new scientist is named Carlos. He has a square jaw and teeth like a military cemetery. His hair is perfect-- _everything_ about him is perfect--and Cecil falls in love instantly.

But Carlos doesn’t fall in love too, and that seems odd to Cecil. Love is a thing that is supposed to be felt back, he knows. He doesn’t know how he knows, but the dull ache in his mind, like a fingernail being scraped over a partially healed scab, tells him so. A memory, he thinks. One he can’t remember remembering, not exactly.

There had been a man once with eyes like ash and a smile like death, and he loved Cecil. And then there had been a brief, searing pain, and Cecil had loved him too. Loved the man’s teeth in his flesh, his hands around his throat, his dark appendage thrashing angrily within him. He loved the man telling him how beautiful he looked soaked in his own blood, and that he shouldn’t cry because it ruined his perfect smile. But Cecil seemed to love the crying most of all, because he continued to do it. In time, the man came to love the crying too, and that made Cecil love doing it all the more. Or at least he thinks that’s why he cried more. It’s difficult to remember. That’s the funny thing about memories: they don’t exist!

It was nice to be loved though, he thinks. Having someone who wants to take everything that you are and ever will be and strip you of it to make it theirs. How romantic! Carlos isn’t romantic, and it’s terribly disappointing. Every time Cecil walks up to him on the street and smiles sweetly as he insists “I love you!”, Carlos just narrows his eyes and walks away. It’s upsetting, and Cecil can’t help but wonder what he’s doing wrong.

So he tries to remember things he doesn’t remember about being in love with a man he can’t forget, but it’s all a haze. He wishes he could remember. He wishes he could forget the things he doesn’t remember. It puts a metallic taste in his mouth to think about them, and it’s never until several moments later that he realizes he’s bitten through his tongue again. He wishes he wouldn’t do that. It happens each time, and the medical bills are getting quite expensive. But there’s something this time, something that comes back with him through the blood and the void. Something that drags itself along on the back of his brain stem, as though his consciousness is a life raft out of some unknowable horror locked away in his psyche. Which is silly, of course. He would remember something like that living in his psyche.

But it’s a thing, and it’s there, and it’s a touch. A simple touch is slogged back through the headache and the tears and the bitten tongue, and Cecil knows what he must do.

It’s almost hurtful how Carlos tries to avoid him the next time they meet, but Cecil doesn’t mind because Carlos is about to fall in love, and all is forgiven when you’re in love. Carlos says he doesn’t have time for Cecil today, that he’s very busy, and can this wait?

“Of course it can’t wait, silly!” Cecil shouts exuberantly. “You’re going to fall in love!

Carlos looks confused, but it’s fine because he doesn’t have to understand. That’s not what love is about. So Cecil places a hand over Carlos’ cheek and ear, stares deeply into his gorgeous brown eyes, and repeats very slowly, steadily…

“I love you.”

Carlos sighs in annoyance, and Cecil scrunches up his nose in confusion.

“Didn’t you feel that?”

“Feel what?” Carlos asks him as he crosses his arms.

Oh dear…

“Wait, hold on,” Cecil mutters, trying to remember the things he does remember. “I don’t think I’m doing this right.”

He thinks about times long past when the pressure in his mind was so great he could feel his blood within him, and spilling out of him. He thinks about the man with teeth like jagged rocks that would strip him of his flesh, like he was rolling to the bottom of a bottomless gully. He thinks about darkness so bright that it blinded him from something important, something he kept telling himself to remember; a void-shaped blackness in his mind that hadn’t been there before, wasn’t there by choice, and should be scrubbed away. He thinks he hears Carlos screaming.

He does.

Carlos is on his knees, clutching desperately at Cecil’s wrist and trying to push his hand away, and Cecil feels rude for willfully ignoring his discomfort, but it seems he can’t remove his hand either. So he kneels with Carlos and waits for him to calm down, to stop screaming, stop crying, stop clawing at his scalp and face. It’s such a shame that his beautiful face will be marred with scratch marks, Cecil thinks, and he places his other hand on Carlos’ other cheek and shushes him softly, soothingly, though in truth Carlos can take as long as he likes to scream. It’s not as though anyone will try to stop him. The people of Night Vale are quite resilient, and a man screaming on the sidewalk is hardly worth their notice. Perhaps Carlos realizes this, that no one will make his pain stop but him, because his eyes are wide and terrified and feral and beautiful, and Cecil smiles. And Carlos smiles too, though the smile doesn’t touch his eyes.

“Cecil,” he says, and it’s such a beautiful way that he says it. So full of barely contained joy and barely masked fear. “I...love you.”

And Cecil is so happy that he kisses Carlos, and even ignores the way he screws his eyes tightly shut as though he’s trying to forget some vague horror niggling at the back of his consciousness like a great, black rat chewing away the last frayed edges of his broken sanity. Cecil thinks it’s impressive and thinks Carlos is so strong because, in some dark corner of his own mind, he remembers a time after the pain and before the love when he wandered a murky wilderness of trees made of bone giving blossom to flowers that smelled of rotting meat, and always a shadow out of the corner of his eye, but never seen. And he wandered those woods an eternity, and came back in a week, and he was in love. But Carlos, his perfect Carlos with his perfect hair and smile, is hardly gone from him for a minute before the love he feels brings him back.

Cecil thinks this must mean Carlos loves him more than he had ever loved the man with hair like sinew and hands like the icy black touch of the void itself, and Cecil is glad that he is so loved.

 

 

* * *

It’s a sad truth that Cecil doesn’t actually know what to do now that he is loved. Before, in the times he can never forget that he remembers, he never had to do anything. Or rather, he never had to do anything _first_. A shadow would grow in his mind of some unknown doom reaching out to him, stretching its grasping fingers for him, brushing them against his cheek. The room would warp, pieces shifting slightly askew, overlapping, pulling apart; holes in reality, holes in his thoughts. That’s when he knew he was being loved: when dusk fell inside his mind and snuffed out the light of consciousness, replacing it with the warmth of his lover’s horrors, beautiful as they were, so very beautiful in their grotesqueness. The pale tendrils of his lover grasping wildly at Cecil in the darkness of that warped reality, removed from the world for just them to share. The man whose breath was like fire and dust would tell Cecil he was safe there, was only safe there. Cecil never understood why he shook so much while he was safe. He supposes he’s just odd like that.

But Cecil doesn’t want to warp reality, or even know how to. He thinks he just wants to see Carlos smile, but he already does that, though he’s not very good at it. And he thinks that maybe he’d like to eat with Carlos, just be in his presence and consume food and perhaps even talk. But Carlos isn’t very good at that either, and Cecil wishes he knew why. He wishes he knew why a lot of things seem different about Carlos since he fell in love.

Cecil doesn’t see Carlos much, and it’s very sad. Carlos is so busy with nothing. He walks around town and doesn’t see anything, goes to his lab and doesn’t do anything, listens to the radio and doesn’t hear anything. He jumps when Cecil talks to him, as though he’s coming out of a dream and into a nightmare, looking around wildly for the exit into reality. He flinches when they hold hands or kiss, but he still returns those kisses and Cecil doesn’t understand why he has to be so dramatic about it. Sometimes Cecil thinks Carlos is no longer the man he fell in love with, and it breaks his heart.

Carlos comes to the radio station one day, looking confused as to why he’s at the radio station, with his hair so tragically short, shorn so close to his scalp, and Cecil cries out in shock and abject horror at it. Carlos seems strangely comforted by his new look, however. Cecil begs him, _pleads_ with him to tell him what happened, what would cause him to do such a thing?

“Everything...itched,” Carlos says in that halting way he speaks now, as though each word is a struggle to find in the slurry of his mind, while motioning towards his head with his hands. “Thought maybe...growing inward, you know? My hair...growing inside.”

He grins, and it’s terrible and beautiful, from ear to ear and full of pride as he says, “It’s not.”

Cecil wraps his arms around Carlos and nuzzles against his significantly shorter hair, trying to show he’s okay with it, that he won’t cry and cause a fuss about it, and Carlos stiffens then trembles violently, his voice full of terrified alarm as he shrieks, “ _Why are you touching me? Why are you TOUCHING ME?_ ”

“I love you,” is all Cecil says in response, and Carlos immediately goes limp, almost collapsing to his knees.

“I love...you,” the scientist responds, softly, but emotionlessly, as though it’s a thought he has to ponder for a moment rather than a feeling he experiences. But that’s fine because Cecil knows love is just as much about remembering that you love someone as it is about actually loving them.

Carlos never shows interest in loving Cecil, which Cecil supposes he should find odd, but he begins to think that maybe Carlos has just never been in love before. Cecil certainly hadn’t known what love was about before the man with a voice as sweet as apples that had long been rotting in the desert sun showed him how to love. Love is violent, it’s painful, and it happens when someone least expects it, and Cecil supposes he has to be the one to show Carlos what that’s like. But not at the radio station, he thinks. He may not be able to rend the fabric of reality into some semblance of a safe haven for them to share, but he still thinks that they should share their love somewhere private, just for them.

It’s important for it to be private. People shouldn’t see the blood or hear the screams; that’s just common courtesy. That’s what Cecil had been told so long ago by...that man. That man he can’t remember to forget.

Cecil doesn’t mean to get so upset about Carlos’ hair on the radio. He doesn’t mean to do a lot of things that are done. Things just seem to get done around him without him having much say in it, like Telly being driven out of town. He doesn’t understand why they listen, why they do these things, why they show up looking proud and waiting for adoration as though the entire town was one enormous cat laying dead things at his door to show its appreciation.

Carlos does not appreciate it. Carlos accosts Cecil outside of the Arby’s one day, swinging fists and howling accusations of murder; that he put a hit out on someone, that he’s destroying everything in Carlos’ life, everything he touches. Cecil can forget the feral look in Carlos’ eyes and the spittle foaming on his lips as he screams. He can forget the awful insults and slurs Carlos calls him. He can even forget the tender bruises he sustains on his cheeks and eye from being held down and beaten. But what Cecil can’t forget is the patches of purple blood on his pristine white lab coat after Carlos hugs him and cries and begs forgiveness and demands to know why, _WHY_ does he feel this way and _WHY_ does he hate and love and fear and _WHY_ couldn’t it stop. Couldn’t it just stop? Just for a while? Cecil decides it can’t wait any longer, he can’t wait for Carlos to come to him. He has to show him what love is, and soon, or he’ll lose Carlos entirely.

 

 

* * *

Cecil can’t find a special place to take Carlos to. He finds himself wishing he could just warp reality into whatever space they need, but that’s not his skill, was never his skill. His skill is much different, though just as unbelievable, and he’s nervous about using it.

Cecil can’t find a special place, and he can’t create a special place, so he decides it’s best to go to Carlos’ place because that, at least, should be special enough to him, and these are desperate times. It’s late, incredibly late, but there are lights on in the laboratory, and Cecil seems to remember noticing that Carlos has seemed increasingly tired as his behavior has become increasingly erratic. He wonders if he should have been more concerned about that, but decides he can worry about it later.

Carlos opens the door hesitantly, releasing only a sliver of light as he peers through the crack he’s opened into the rest of the world, and Cecil does his best to smile and look friendly despite the very important task he’s come to take care of, but Carlos still doesn’t let him in.

“What do you want?” he says, his voice sounding like it’s being dragged over coarse sandpaper, and his speech sounding much more coherent and fluid than usual.

“I _love_ you,” Cecil insists, and if he sounds frustrated it’s only because he’s concerned with how much he has to keep reminding Carlos of that fact. Cecil doesn’t remember needing to hear it _nearly_ this often when he was still with that...man whose flesh was cold as the grave and grey as the day before a storm. That man that can never be forgotten and will never be remembered.

Carlos’ eyes glaze over, but he doesn’t relax even close to as much as he usually does at the words, and it’s so much worse than Cecil had expected. He pushes the door open slowly, and Carlos walks away as though he’s already forgotten why he had been at the door, and forgotten what he had been doing before he had answered the door. Cecil can’t tell what he had been doing either. Nothing in the lab seems in working order, which should strike him as odd since other scientists work there too, but the place looks almost abandoned. Papers lay in disheveled piles on any open surface, or cover the floor like the most scientific tiling imaginable. Petri dishes lay uncovered and molded over, as do the slides laying around that are not simply smashed. Even the cups of half-finished coffee are growing floating islands of specimens just ripe for having science done to them.

Carlos walks right past it all and sits at the only stool that isn’t knocked over or splintered and broken, and he stares idly into a microscope with no slide on its stage. It’s sad in a way, and inspiring in another; that he would be so determined to do his science that he would continue to do it even as he forgot to remember how to. It had taken Cecil years before he could host another radio show, though the listeners had never seemed to notice much of a difference. No one ever seems to notice much of anything about Cecil, when he thinks about it. No one except Carlos. Now, anyway.

Cecil slowly removes his shirt and tie as he positions himself behind Carlos, taking a deep breath then exhaling slowly, and as his breath leaves him, so do his tentacles. There’s dozens of them, Cecil doesn’t know exactly how many. He’s never seen them all at once, or even tried to. They stretch out almost endlessly, no light touching them as they are the beautiful, unblemished color of the void. One brushes past Carlos’ cheek, and he sniffles, his tears hitting the microscope with a soft patter. He shivers as Cecil removes his lab coat, and continues shivering when Cecil removes his t-shirt. The tentacles surround Carlos, touching him lightly, reverently. He shudders in disgust and huddles in on himself, but does not leave.

“Why?” he rasps, his voice so hoarse as to almost be a whisper. “ _Why?_ ”

“I love you,” Cecil says, alarmed at having to remind him again so soon, and places his hands on Carlos’ shoulders. “Don’t you love me?”

“I...love…” Carlos trails off into a sobbing fit.

“I need to show you my love,” Cecil continues as he reaches down to undo Carlos’ belt. “Will you let me?”

Carlos doesn’t respond, too busy staring off into the endless void of the tentacles filling the lab, eyes blank as death as the tears roll lazily down his cheeks. Cecil wants to wait for his reply, but there’s simply no time, and he’s very sorry for it, but Carlos doesn’t leave, and that’s enough for him.

Cecil lifts Carlos slowly, cautiously, because he doesn’t want to startle him, but he needs him bent over the table in order to remove his trousers. Carlos makes no sound, no protest. He’s either prepared for this or resigned to his fate, and Cecil hates to admit it, but either work for his purposes. He’s woefully unskilled at this part of showing love, unfortunately, having only ever been on the receiving end of it. He _thinks_ he knows what to do, or can at least figure it out, but Carlos is human and Cecil...well, he’s not, so there must be some differences he doesn’t know about

The first tentacle presses into Carlos gently, but his tears redouble anyway, staining the papers beneath his cheek, but he remains silent, unblinking. He does not leave. Cecil presses another tentacle in, wriggling them about experimentally, and Carlos sucks in a shuddering breath, but makes no other sound. Cecil, on the other hand, makes quite a few sounds; soft whimpers and gasps as his body begins to rapidly heat, and he finally understands why he was loved so much so long ago in a time that he will never remember and refuse to forget, those bittersweet memories that bore holes into his consciousness and fill them with warmth and decay.

Carlos begins making sounds, strangled whining sounds that seem horribly conflicted, and Cecil thinks he must have been right when he thought Carlos had never been loved before, because he seems to not be able to choose how to he should feel about it. Cecil presses a third tentacle into Carlos, thrashing them about inside his searing heat, and Carlos chokes out a throaty moan before falling back to tears and whimpers and thrusts erratically backwards against Cecil, though his knuckles are white from gripping the table in attempt to stay still, but he does not leave.

Cecil runs his hands over Carlos’ back and hips and thighs, and he discovers something odd, something thick and stiff and twitching. He touches it, and Carlos groans sorrowfully and smacks his forehead against the table, so Cecil touches it again, running his fingers up the length of it before running them back down. It makes Carlos arch off the table, makes him buck harder against Cecil’s hips, and it makes Cecil gasp and moan and press against him and stroke lovingly at his own tentacles as he strokes lovingly at Carlos’ and Carlos tightens around him, and he thinks they must be close now, close to sharing their love, close to being bound together. Then Carlos begins talking, speaking quickly and incoherently, chanting some semblance of words that starts low and the grows in volume and intensity until he’s shouting _WHY_ at the top of his lungs, and Cecil is startled when Carlos pushes himself upright and turns to face him, face streaked with tears and eyes burning with rage.

“ _WHY_ , Cecil?” he howls. “ _WHY_ do I love you? What did you _DO_ to me?”

Cecil recoils in horror because this isn’t how love works, he’s sure. He never did this, not once, not with…

Carlos grabs Cecil by the neck and squeezes, forcing him back against the wall and slamming his head against it once, twice, three times, and doesn’t stop until Cecil has tears in his eyes and hastily retracts his tentacles.

“I thought,” he begins and hiccups, “th-this was how love worked.”

Carlos throws him to the floor, kicks him in the side. “How the _FUCK_ could you think that?”

“B-but,” Cecil sniffles as he huddles into himself on the floor, curling away from the foot in his ribs, “i-it’s all I’ve ever kn-known.

Carlos stares at him fists balled as he _seethes_ , breath coming heavy, but something in him snaps in a different direction, broken in a different way, and he turns his back on Cecil and hisses at him to leave.

But Cecil doesn’t leave. Carlos turns on him with naked fury and roars at him to leave, and Cecil finally begins to slink away, feeling so ashamed, so horribly ashamed, because he loves Carlos _so much_ and he couldn’t make it work, and now it was ruined forever. Carlos would never speak to him, never look at him, and it wouldn’t even be like it was before because he wouldn’t be polite about it. And Cecil couldn’t help but wonder what had happened when he’d lost his love before, what had kept him from forgetting to remember...that... _Kevin_.

Cecil launches himself at Carlos, tackling him to the ground and pinning him with all the strength in his tentacles as he presses his hand against his cheek and ear again, and Carlos struggles and screams, but this is important, this is _necessary_. Cecil remembers all that he could, pouring the thoughts through his mind like a sieve to find the important bits of viscera that Kevin had left behind. All of the pain, the fear, the anger, all of it barely remembered, all of it barely there, all of it gone in a heartbeat, never to be remembered, never to truly be forgotten, never to be discovered unless it was searched for in earnest.

Carlos stills, his eyelids fluttering shut as his eyes roll back, and for once in probably weeks, he falls asleep there on the laboratory floor, and Cecil hopes he has gotten it right this time.

 

 

* * *

Things do go back to normal, the kind of normal they had before Cecil had ever gotten the bright idea to make Carlos love him. He wishes he could remember why he had ever thought that was okay. He wishes he could remember how he ever let his mind get locked away in a maze of half-forgotten memories of traumas long gone. He wishes he could stop crying late into the night over losing Carlos.

He truly is lost to Cecil. Doing things the proper way...it’s so slow. Cecil’s not sure it’ll ever pay off. He often wonders if he should just give up entirely, but can’t find the strength to not be in Carlos’ life somehow.

He talks about Carlos on the radio, when he can. Now that he’s back to doing actual science, there is usually a story or two that Cecil can throw him into, but it’s never enough, never will be.

Cecil tries to take comfort in the fact that Carlos is happy again, whole again, but it’s so _hard_. It’s not what he had wanted, but then, none of it was, he supposes. He also supposes this is the best he can hope for. He can say hello to Carlos and sometimes even receive a hello in return. He can smile at him and not receive a fearful shiver in response. He can listen to him talk about important science things, and even interview him about them, but it’s still not the same.

He still tries sometimes. Tries to insinuate himself into Carlos’ life. Tries to win back his love in a way that’s less than subtle. Cecil was never great with subtlety. He asks Carlos about the earthquakes they’ve been experiencing yet not feeling, and Carlos sighs, his eyes not quite as tired as they had been. Cecil supposes he should be glad that he’s recovering, that he doesn’t remember why he needs to recover. But it’s difficult to be truly happy when Carlos is too busy being who he used to be to answer a simple question about where he bought his shirt, so Cecil can buy an exact copy of it and perform a few hopeful blood rituals with it. Anything to win Carlos’ love. _Anything_. But it’s no use. He tries not to cry about his inability to break through to him, but it upsets him so much. Cecil doesn’t know if Carlos listens to him sometimes.


End file.
